Author: Aldo D. Scaglione
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN:
Category : Love in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
'Chiefly an essay in the cultural context of the Decameron.'

Author: Aldo Scaglione
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Thomas Willard
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782503590448
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
The environment--together with ecology and other aspects of the way people see their world--has become a major focus of pre-modern studies. The thirteen contributions in this volume discuss topics across the millennium in Europe from the late 600s to the early 1600s. They introduce applications to older texts, art works, and ideas made possible by relatively new fields of discourse such as animal studies, ecotheology, and Material Engagement Theory. From studies of medieval land charters and epics to the canticles sung in churches, the encyclopedic natural histories compiled for the learned, the hunting parks described and illustrated for the aristocracy, chronicles from the New World, classical paintings from the Old World, and the plays of Shakespeare, the authors engage with the human responses to nature in times when it touched their lives more intimately than it does for people today, even though this contact raised concerns that are still very much alive today.

Author: Joan Cadden
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812208587
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
In his Problemata, Aristotle provided medieval thinkers with the occasion to inquire into the natural causes of the sexual desires of men to act upon or be acted upon by other men, thus bringing human sexuality into the purview of natural philosophers, whose aim it was to explain the causes of objects and events in nature. With this philosophical justification, some late medieval intellectuals asked whether such dispositions might arise from anatomy or from the psychological processes of habit formation. As the fourteenth-century philosopher Walter Burley observed, "Nothing natural is shameful." The authors, scribes, and readers willing to "contemplate base things" never argued that they were not vile, but most did share the conviction that they could be explained. From the evidence that has survived in manuscripts of and related to the Problemata, two narratives emerge: a chronicle of the earnest attempts of medieval medical theorists and natural philosophers to understand the cause of homosexual desires and pleasures in terms of natural processes, and an ongoing debate as to whether the sciences were equipped or permitted to deal with such subjects at all. Mining hundreds of texts and deciphering commentaries, indices, abbreviations, and marginalia, Joan Cadden shows how European scholars deployed a standard set of philosophical tools and a variety of rhetorical strategies to produce scientific approaches to sodomy.

Author: Elizabeth Eva Leach
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501727575
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Is birdsong music? The most frequent answer to this question in the Middle Ages was resoundingly "no." In Sung Birds, Elizabeth Eva Leach traces postmedieval uses of birdsong within Western musical culture. She first explains why such melodious sound was not music for medieval thinkers and then goes on to consider the ontology of music, the significance of comparisons between singers and birds, and the relationship between art and nature as enacted by the musical performance of late-medieval poetry. If birdsong was not music, how should we interpret the musical depiction of birdsong in human music-making? What does it tell us about the singers, their listeners, and the moral status of secular polyphony? Why was it the fourteenth century that saw the beginnings of this practice, continued to this day in the music of Messiaen and others?Leach explores medieval arguments about song, language, and rationality whose basic terms survive undiminished into the present. She considers not only lyrics that have their singers voice the songs or speech of birds but also those that represent other natural, nonmusical, sounds such as human cries or the barks of dogs. The dangerous sweetness of birdsong was invoked in discussions of musical ethics, which, because of the potential slippage between irrational beast and less rational woman in comparisons with rational human masculinity, depict women's singing as less than fully human. Leach's argument comes full circle with the advent of sound recording. This technological revolution-like its medieval equivalent, the invention of the music book-once again made the relationship between music and nature an acute preoccupation of Western culture.

Author: Georges Duby
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226167747
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
The author argues that the structure of sexual relationships took its cue from the family and feudalism - both bastions of masculinity - as he presents his interpretation of women, what they represented and what they were in the Middle Ages

Author: Conor McCarthy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134397704
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Author: H. Cooney
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403983534
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This is a set of essays from many of the leading scholars in the world of medieval studies, which addresses a wide diversity of texts and genres and their diverse perspectives on love. Attention is given to interaction between English writings and putative continental and international influences, with particular emphasis on the works of Chaucer.

Author: William Manchester
Publisher: Back Bay Books
ISBN: 0316082791
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
A "lively and engaging" history of the Middle Ages (Dallas Morning News) from the acclaimed historian William Manchester, author of The Last Lion. From tales of chivalrous knights to the barbarity of trial by ordeal, no era has been a greater source of awe, horror, and wonder than the Middle Ages. In handsomely crafted prose, and with the grace and authority of his extraordinary gift for narrative history, William Manchester leads us from a civilization tottering on the brink of collapse to the grandeur of its rebirth: the dense explosion of energy that spawned some of history's greatest poets, philosophers, painters, adventurers, and reformers, as well as some of its most spectacular villains. "Manchester provides easy access to a fascinating age when our modern mentality was just being born." --Chicago Tribune

Author: Georges Duby
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780745606811
Category : Europe
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
A collection of 16 essays written between 1967 and 1986 examining the poetry and practice of courtly love and the mores of aristocratic marriages. In the first part of the book Duby argues that the structure of sexual relationships took its cue from the family and from feudalism, whilst in the second he reflects on more general issues in the writing of cultural history, on the history of pain and heresy, and the state of historical research in France over recent generations. Now available in paperback.